Alcohol Q&A with Lyle McDonald

Q: I am a a huge fan of yours and have read almost all of your books and most of your articles and newsletters. I am quite sure you have already addressed this topic but I don't remember where. Here it is: if a calorie is just a calorie do you think it is possible to incorporate alcoholic beverages in a diet? is it true that alcohol slows down the fat burning process? There is a level of alcohol during a diet that can be considered ok?

A: Alcohol is a very strange nutrient when it comes to effects on bodyweight. Very strange indeed.

Most realistically this represents differences in how males and females typically drink. Males typically drink along with eating fatty foods (wings anybody), females tend to drink in lieu of eating.

However, even there, studies examining weight gain with alcohol suggest that some of the calories are 'missing', the expected weight gain doesn't show up. Nobody really knows why. It's been suggested that there may be increased metabolic uncoupling or thermogenesis and that more of the alcohol calories are wasted, this seems to be especially prevalent with long-term alcoholics, most likely due to damage to their live.

Beyond that, alcohol is a 'toxin' to the body, when ingested it shuts down the burning of all other nutrients (including fat). Which is a big part of why the combo of alcohol plus high fat foods is a double whammy for fat gain.

However, in the context of maintenance or below maintenance calories, it's probably not such an issue. Quite in fact, there is some indication that it might help with leanness.

A recent paper found that 40 g alcohol per day increased levels of a hormone called adiponectin. Released from fat cells, adiponectin is one of the hormones that actually goes up with weight/fat loss. Among other things it improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity and activates something called AMPk which is involved in fat burning.

Amusingly in this regards, there is an old diet called the Drinking Man's diet which, as I recall, was lowcarb but based around daily alcohol intake. Perhaps it wasn't so absurd after all.

So alcohol might turn out to be the dieter's big secret.
Note: the next question was actually a followup to an email question regarding an article I wrote called "Determining the Maximal Dietary Deficit". That's what he's referring to in the first paragraph.